W.E.B. DuBois: The Fight for Equality and The American Century, 1919-1963

In this final, magisterial volume, fifteen years in the research and writing, The Pulitzer Prize—winning biographer David Levering Lewis stunningly re-creates the second half of W.E.B Du Bois’s charged and brilliant career. Beginning with the return of World War 1 African American veterans to the riots and lynchings of the “Red Summer” of 1919 and ending with Dubois’s self-imposed exile and death in Ghana forty-four years later, Lewis charts the dramatic evolution of the premier architect of the civil rights movement from Talented Tenth elitist to internationalist and proponent of economic as well as racial democracy for all people of color. Based on original research on three continents, this richly-detailed volume of history alters our understanding of the culture and politics of race in the twentieth century.

Lewis chronicles the titanic struggle between Dubois and Marcus Garvey’s “back to Africa” movement and interprets the Harlem Renaissance as a civil rights enterprise masquerading as an arts movement that Du Bois, a movement impresario soon renounced in search of economic solutions to the race problem. After inspiring millions of Black and white readers through the NAACP journal The Crisis, Du Bois left the NAACP in a firestorm of controversy to pursue a politically risky course that took him inside Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, China, and Japan as the major politics of the American century were taking shape. Leaving mainstream historians to absorb the seismic impact of his 1935 masterpiece Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois looked increasingly to socialism in his search for race solutions after a postwar return to the NAACP that ended with his embrace of the Progressive Party politics of Henry Wallace, a deepening friendship with Paul Robeson, and an expanding circle of friends on the left. Federal indictment as a foreign agent and humiliation followed but failed to silence the prescient voice that would come to inspire new generations with its genius. Had he died at fifty, the great contrarian said that he would have been acclaimed. “At seventy-five, my death was practically requested.”

The New York Times Book Review wrote of the first volume of W.E.B. Du Bois, “One almost participates in the life.” With this masterly concluding volume, David Levering Lewis has restored the towering and flawed figure of W.E.B. Du Bois to a central place in modern American history.

Endorsements

George M. Frederickson, The NYRB

“One of the finest biographies that this country has produced.”

John Hope Franklin, Duke

“I did not think it was possible for David Lewis to surpass what he had accomplished in the first volume of his Du Bois biography, but he has.  In his second volume he confirms the view of many of us who  believe that he is the finest American historian plying his craft today.”

Donald M. Kennedy, Stanford

“A masterpiece of the biographer’s craft   With this volume David Levering Lewis has brought to magnificent completion his definitive biography of W.E.B. Du Bois. Lewis writes with consistent empathy, balance, and grace about one of the twentieth century’s most complicated and controversial figures. A must-read for anyone seeking to understand the tortured history of race relations in the modern world.”